Not every prospect is immediately one of the better Centers in the draft.
Jake O’Brien’s season started slow; he looked like for all the world that sure, he might be able to make the first round, but at best in the middle of the round or maybe towards the end of night one. O’Brien didn’t take that lying down, applied his craft with aplomb down the stretch (and critically missed being part of a disaster of a Canadian World Juniors squad), and really found himself in the middle and latter half of the year, to the point that he’s gone from top teens hopeful, to top ten expectant.
Let’s go on ahead and see what this young man can do!
Who is he?
Jake O’Brien is a Canadian Center who is a right-handed shot. He measures at 6’2, and weighs in at 175 pounds. He plays for the Brantford Bulldogs in the OHL.
What’s he good at?
Playmaking.
O’Brien is able to find holes in defenses quickly and uses a very strong hand-eye coordination skill to either find a seam in a defense that hasn’t been covered yet, or beat a defender one-on-one by using his tricky stickhandling and impressive body control to either open up a chance for himself, or far more likely his teammates; turning his shifts into an abject nightmare to defend as he first finds the weaknesses in his opponent’s backcheck, and then immediately starts pressing against those weaknesses in different ways; either by finding ways to stretch the ice out, force board battles against mismatched defenders, or just flat out beating them with speed if he needs to. The casualness of which he does it can be a real danger for these OHL kids; who simply aren’t expecting a pass to be sent to extremely good players that quickly and that smoothly at this level; giving his very talented teammates a chance to just wire the puck home without much thought; O’Brien’s already done the hard part for them.
While he is a playmaker, and his statline this year of 32 goals and 66 assists reflects that, he can do a lot of scoring on his own.
That stickhandling isn’t just for slick passes; he can absolutely hammer a shot with very little windup on his shots and it does not take much movement on his part to start picking corners; augmented by his very crafty ability to adjust his place on the ice in scoring position veeeeery subtly, happily catching defenders moving even slightly out of position as he rips one home, because he is rarely if ever going to take a shot that a stick could block. This of course, only forces teams to treat him with an outsized amount of respect or spend the entire game trying to contain him…which opens up lanes and forces players out of position, which feeds back into his playmaking game.
His ability to think the sport also helps him tremendously in the neutral zone and defensive zone; being responsible in his own end and active in trying to break up and pressure his opponent into coughing up the puck; usually so he can get it and create an opportunity. It’s this level of play recognition and intelligence with and without the puck that has him moving up draft boards at breakneck pace; as he really seemed to come into his own after the World juniors finished; with him able to play with kids his age and not being bogged down by whatever the hell was going on with Canada’s squad that ate quite a few promising seasons.
What does he need to work on?
Being scrawny, and faceoffs.
For all his strengths as a playmaking Center, the one area of his game O’Brien struggled with consistently throughout the year was faceoffs. Even after O’Brien significantly improved his game over the course of the year, he ended up with a faceoff-% just under 50%, which is something that he’s gonna have to improve if he wants to stay a Center at the NHL level.
Of course, that low faceoff-% may be the result of the other thing he needs to work on; his strength and his weight. O’Brien is a skinny 6’2; with his final weigh-in being at roughly 175 pounds. O’Brien’s game doesn’t quite require him to be a physical presence, but it is something he can get only away with in the OHL where he’s playing against teenagers. In the NHL, he’s about the size of say…Cole Caufield, without the novelty of being short enough to disappear into the cycle. He’s gonna need to add some weight to his frame in order to survive the the kind of danger he would be put into in the pro level of game.
My Verdict
O’Brien seems like the kind of player who’s issues could be very easily fixed by simply getting older and by having pro-level training staff working with him. He really feels like a player getting lost in the shuffle on account of being almost so complete as a player it feels like there’s little room to grow. He starts good and will likely stay good. So he’ll lose some faceoffs. That’s fine. He’s got enough skills to get the puck back, and with some calories and some weights, he could very easily get that number up.
Personally? I’d draft him in a heartbeat if guys like Desnoyers weren’t available.